Science-based business strategies are the best kind, and I enjoy both creating and sharing them. That led me to write Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing (Wiley, 2011) as well as my blog Neuromarketing. My new book (Summer, 2015) will be The Persuasion Slide. I'm all about practical applications, not theory. I’m the founder of Dooley Direct, a marketing consultancy, and I co-founded College Confidential, the leading college-bound website. That business was acquired by Hobsons, a unit of UK-based DMGT, where I served as VP Digital Marketing and continue in a consulting role. I spent years in direct marketing as the co-founder of a successful catalog firm, and before that directed corporate planning for a Fortune 1000 company. You can learn more about me and my speaking at RogerDooley.com. Follow me on Twitter at @rogerdooley.

Nonprofits: Drive Behavior With Social Media

A real-life experiment by Facebook to encourage organ donation, adding one’s donor status to one’s timeline, sparked an immediate 2,000% increase in the number of people signing up as donors. Even after the initial flurry, signups continued at a rate double the previous rate, reports Mediapost. These remarkable results highlight the huge opportunity that social media offer to nonprofit groups.

Your Brain on Altruism Nonprofit organizations tend to be all about driving behavior. They need first time donors. They need existing donors to give more. They need volunteers to help their cause. Sometimes, they strive to encourage others to change their behavior – say, adopt healthy habits or take actions that benefit others (like signing an organ donor card).

The problem is that changing the behavior of others is hard work. If you doubt that, ask anyone who has led a fundraising effort or managed a volunteer recruitment process!

The good news is that humans are wired for altruism. While we can be selfish at times, an altruistic streak was no doubt a major advantage in the success of early human communities. In fact, brain scans show that altruistic actions can light up brain areas associated with rewards and selfish desires. (See The Joy of Giving.)

Altruism As A Signal Beyond the benefits to the overall community when we help others, there’s another motivating factor described by evolutionary psychologists: altruistic behavior is a signal of “fitness” to others. In Helping Others Makes You Hot, I describe research showing that both men and women find members of the opposite sex more attractive when they demonstrate altruistic behavior.

Both donations and volunteering are signals of fitness, i.e., that the individual has more than adequate resources and also is likely to be a capable parent. (In evolutionary psychology, “mating” instincts play a major role in guiding behavior even when actual procreation isn’t remotely possible.) There are some gender differences – volunteering is a more potent signal for women than monetary donations.

The Opportunity In Social Media Nonprofits have always exploited this need for public recognition by donors and volunteers – they honor them at events, they engrave their name on plaques, and so on. Of course, these types of recognition are expensive and time-consuming. Small donors, occasional helpers, etc. can’t be recognized this way.

As the organ donor signup boost indicates, social media outlets offer an inexpensive but powerful way to recognize and encourage desired behavior. Someone taking the minimal step of signing up as an organ donor wouldn’t get a footnote on a brass plaque or even the briefest mention at a fundraiser, but could be acknowledged on FacebookFacebook at essentially zero cost. That person’s entire circle of friends could now see that she had signed up, and, presumably, some of them did too.

While you may not be able to enlist Facebook’s direct support in the same way organ donation groups did, there are plenty of ways you can recognize your supporters in a way that is visible to their friends and others. Generating a modified profile photo with a special badge would provide great exposure, as would generating recognition content (an auto-generated, customized web page, for example) that your supporter could like or share with their friends.

Today, all kinds of activities provide a sharing opportunity (“Thanks for installing our app… share it with your friends!” or “You’ve reached Level 11! Post to Facebook!”) Most people ignore these appeals lest they clutter their timeline or tweet stream with commercial pitches. But, those same people would be far more likely to share positive recognition from an organization they support:

“I just received the Platinum Helper Award from…”

“I just contributed to… Click here to learn about the great work they do!

Depending on the non-profit’s nature, elements of gamification can be used to encourage supporters to do even more, all with social recognition and sharing.

Does your nonprofit (or one you support) make effective use of social media to publicly recognize its supporters? Post a comment with your example!

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The American Conference on Diversity — a New Brunswick, NJ-based nonprofit dedicated to educating and empowering the next generation of leaders, enhancing workplaces, and helping to create inclusive communities since 1948 — posts photos of event signage and promotional materials that list our sponsors/supporters across our platforms. For example, this Twitter post from our Diversity Stride 2013 walk-a-thon at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, in May generated multiple retweets:

Thanks Roger. We are a national nonprofit focused on women’s personal safety, we give away free pepper sprays to women. We fund those free pepper spray giveaways via donations and sales of other personal defense products.

We’ve long posted photos of women with their free pepper sprays and purchased products on our Twitter account and Facebook pages, and they get a great response and bump in involvement from them and their friends, especially once they are tagged.

We are next exploring an idea of a named/logo’d “club” for donors and supporters… for them to show their support to their personal networks. It sounds like your points here would support that idea?

I work for Forget Me Not Children’s Hospice in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England, and one of the most powerful things we find that we do through social media is sharing stories and pictures of our supporters.

Whether it be a £50 bake sale or a £10,000 ball, using real life stories with images of the people who have made it happen really appeals to our supporters. We pride ourselves on being able to offer our supporters the outlet of our social media to also help promote some of their events/challenges which has proven to, not only spread the word on what they are doing, but also encourage further people to perhaps look at doing something similar.

People enjoy to see others supporting charity and can prove to be a great motivational tool. With the use of Twitter we are able to keep up to date with people’s events and how they are going on, allowing us to make pre and post comments about their challenge.

Like all charities, we are hugely grateful for the amazing support we get from our wider community, and by being able to potentially shout to the world about how great they are, in just a matter of seconds, is too powerful a tool to ignore.